The Haunted Country

by Jason White

  I pull the trigger and immediately regret using my hip for leverage as the kickback slams hard into bone and what little muscle I have there.

  Both the zombie and I collapse to the floor, a scream coming from my lips. My ears ring. I drop the shotgun and fall, gripping my hip which I fear may be broken. I can’t move it or my right leg. The pain is so intense it sends shooting stars to zip through my vision. My eyes slowly blur with tears, and my head spins with dizziness. It feels as though I was the one who was shot.

  The zombies at the other end of the room reach where Cindy has fallen. They bend over, grabbing at her with their arms, their jaws opening wide and then snapping closed. She kicks and punches at them, and despite the pain in my hip, my heart ripples with pride. There was a time, not long ago, like when we were being held captive in the basement by that freak with the penchant for necrophilia, she would have just laid there and taken it. She would have gone screaming, but she wouldn’t have fought.

  I don’t know what changed in her to make her fight, but the time to figure it out is not available.

  I’m able to move my hip and right leg before I’m even aware of it. Suddenly, I’m on my knees, grabbing the shotgun. I reload it and snap it closed, pump it, then get on my feet and hurry to my sister. I shoot the zombie by her head in its midsection, so as to avoid catching Cindy with buckshot. This tears the zombie in half, wormy black intestines splattering on the floor like thick, rotted worms while its legs go spinning onto the floor.

  This was probably the wrong thing to do as it brings the dangerous part closer to Cindy. The zombie continues open its jaw and snap it shut as though nothing had happened to it, but the remainder of its weight is now on Cindy’s arms, and I doubt she’ll be able to hold it up much longer.

  Swinging the stock, I hit the zombie in the side of its head and keep doing it until it falls from my sister’s grip and onto the floor, from where I bash in its skull.

  Cindy cries out, looking down at her feet and the undead lying there. It has a strong grip of her right legs and is getting dangerously close to getting a mouthful of flesh.

  The stock crashes into the top of its head with the sound of cracking bone and the zombie stops trying to bite my sister and it moves no more.

  Gunshots sound from outside. Grant’s in trouble, so I grab Cindy around her shoulders and lift her to her feet. My head spins and my hip aches like all kinds of hell, but we get to the front door.

  “’Arlie,” Cindy says. Was there a note of pride in her voice? Or was that simply my overtired, hurting body playing upon my imagination?

  chapter eight

  On the passenger side of the Plymouth, with Cindy curled up in the blanket we brought in place of my winter coat in the back seat, already falling asleep from the trauma she’s experienced since the bandits showed up, I glare at Grant as he thrusts the headlights on and pulls out of the driveway, taking down a few of the undead while doing so.

  There were several unmoving zombies around the Plymouth as Cindy and I had approached it. Once we were inside, Grant looked at me with that irritating calmness, and said, “That was three minutes. I said one. You’re lucky I’m still here! I was about to drive away on you, you know.”

  “You could’ve fucking helped!” I said.

  “Are you stupid?” he asked. “I said I wasn’t leaving the car running with those zombies. And I sure as hell wasn’t turnin’ it off, either!”

  Now, he runs over a zombie and looks at my hand as though hitting a hundred and fifty pounds of flesh bothers him not at all.

  “Besides,” He says, a chuckle in his words. “I knew you needed some practice at surviving. Look at you. Barely made it.”

  I want to kill him. I’m not sure how long I’ve been glaring at him, but it’s not doing any good and I’m too exhausted and in too much pain to yell all the things I want to say. I wish the shotgun blasts had fully damaged my ears so I don’t have to listen to his bullshit. If he had driven off, though, I would have found him and put a bullet in his skull. That I know for certain.

  Surprised at my own anger, at the new and foreign thoughts of violence and vengeance towards something that probably doesn’t even deserve my energy (he had waited, hadn’t he?), I rest my head back and watch the blackness of night pass us by. My eyelids are so heavy I want to close them and never open them again.

  When I do open them, it’s to the sputtering of the Plymouth’s engine and Grant’s cursing. A chill runs through my entire body, the pain in my hip an angry, living thing. I look out at the snow-covered trees to the left, the snow-covered field to my right and realize that the sky is a deep purplish blue, the horizon on fire with the sun just beginning its rise. It looks cold out there, and judging by Grant’s reaction to the Plymouth’s stammering and choking, we’ll soon be walking in it.

  The smell of the dead is strong here, and I wonder if there are zombies nearby. Then I remember the family that had sat in this car for God knows how long, slowly rotting away as they slumbered and waited.

  I can’t imagine what that would have been like, if Zombies are able to experience anything other than hunger. What bothers me more is the thought that I am sitting in the very seat the mother and wife had been trapped in during all that time. Cindy, in the back, is laying on the spot the little girl that had so resembled her in my fogged, panicked brain had sat. It all reeked of death, of inevitability.

  Whatever optimism I was feeling at the farmhouse, whatever strength I had found when we finally escaped melted with the rising sun. There was only death inside the car, and a morning soon to welcome us into its unforgiving, frozen embrace.

  “Come on,” Grant says, “just a little farther!” Does he really think that slamming the steering wheel with his palm will help propel the car onward?

  I sigh, its sound deep and hopeless. I want nothing more than sleep.

  Cindy is, for reasons unknown to me, cheerful. I shiver with the blanket wrapped around my shoulders while she walks at my side, her left hand doing happy dances by her forehead, her mouth opening and closing as the occasional laugh escapes. I hate her at this moment. Grant walks ahead of us, the steam from his mouth curling around his head to dissipate behind him before reaching us. It’s cold. Once of those cold mornings where our feet crunch what would have been soft snow and my spit freezes before it hits the ground.

  My stomach growls; I can’t remember the last time I ate.

  The sun hangs high in a blue sky and does nothing to warm us. We’ve been walking for hours, the road empty and silent, with no houses. Occasionally we come across a sign naming towns and their distances. It all means nothing to me. Occasionally we pass a farmhouse. I hope that Grant picks one before the sun sinks down leaving us in the cold and unforgiving dark.

  The only true sounds we hear are our own grumblings or Cindy’s unfounded joy. This is a good thing, I keep telling myself. It could be worse. It could be filled with the moans of the dead.

  Instead, my stomach is the one moaning, my body one long and continuous tremor. This must be how the walking dead feel when not in slumber and wandering, always looking for warm flesh. A hot and juicy meal.

  “Arlie, ’ook!”

  Cindy points to the sky, her smile huge and full of teeth. A hawk slowly spins up there, its massive wings spread out. Is this anything like walking in the desert, with vultures slowly circling and waiting for you to drop? I try to remember if hawks are carrion eating scavengers, information that should I should easily know, but I can’t remember.

  “It’s a hawk,” I tell Cindy, trying to keep my voice from breaking up. My free hand inside the blanket rubs at my arm, trying to generate heat, and I add a sort of jump to my walk, hoping to keep the blood flowing.

  “A massive, beautiful bird,” I continue. “Some would say they’re majestic.”

  “’Ajesic!” Cindy squeals. I glare at her in her puffy pink winter coat, the pink mittens and toque that Grant had found in her pockets when he helped me put it on her.


  “M-M-Majestic,” I say. “B-B-Big birds. They like to eat m-m-mice.”

  Grant remains walking with his eyes on the hawk. Then he lowers his head without comment. Who is this man we’ve decided to trust? This silent stranger, often calm when most others would be losing their shit? I’d seen him kill two, maybe three men, seemingly without any effect. He just did it and moved on. I don’t know how anyone could kill like that without second thought.

  Maybe he was an assassin before the apocalypse? A soldier? I envision him with a sniper rifle, lying in desert sand, his uniform camouflage desert brown, picking off Muslim soldiers under the scorching sun. Well fit, the man looks like he could run a hundred miles and then only take a few seconds to catch his breath. I’m nothing but skin and bones. A walking skeleton with stomach cramps and a serious limp after that shotgun recoiled onto my hip. Every time I put my weight on my right leg, a dull throb stabs from my hip all the way to my toes. But Grant looks like he’ll never stop.

  “Relax, buddy,” Grant had said when I complained about my pain. “You’re walking, so you didn’t break it. Most likely, the blast bruised all the muscle and bone in your hip.” Then he laughed. “It’s going to be pretty stiff for the next few days.”

  Asshole.

  Murdering asshole.

  Had he really murdered anyone? I’m cold and sore and starving, so my mood is black, so my opinions are suspect even to myself.

  What did Grant do before the dead got back onto their feet? I don’t want to ask for fear of insulting him. Or worse, pissing him off. I have the feeling that pissing him off isn’t a great idea. But , he had saved Cindy’s and my life a couple of times. If anything, I owe him. I know that. Yet, for some reason, I just can’t let him know that I acknowledge it.

  It’s as though doing so would give him power over me. That’s something I don’t think I want. Not yet, anyway.

  “’Awk!” Cindy cries, excitedly. I’ve nearly forgotten what’s gotten her so excited. I look up. The hawk is still spinning around up there, just waiting for us to die. Maybe it’s as hungry as we are and willing to eat just about anything.

  With the memory of Grant firing out the second story window of that farm house, killing one of the bandits, I wonder why he keeps us around? Why save us? Why does he show Cindy such tenderness when only days before he suggested killing her?

  Does he want to eat us?

  The thought makes me shiver even more violently. I figure that, if he had wanted to eat us, he might have by now. But then, he hasn’t really had the time to rub a fork and knife together in anticipation just yet, has he? He could now, if he really wanted too. Perhaps he’s just looking for an opportunity; a house secluded from civilization, like where we are now, where he could chop us up and store our leftovers outside in the cold.

  Cindy laughs at my side, still looking up. I jump at the sound. It comes a little too coincidentally to my thoughts, adding a morbid comic affair to the whole thing.

  Grant is farther ahead than us now; a good fifty yards or so.

  He turns around. “You guys coming or what?” he says.

  This time, the tremble of my body has nothing to do with the cold. Still, I tighten the blanket around my neck, my right hand continues to rub uselessly at my left arm.

  We found the house an hour before sunset. It has been ransacked, with what appeared to have been a battle between the living and the dead. Corpses surround the house, their skulls bashed in but completely rotted to skin and bone. All the windows of the house, aside from a few upstairs, are shattered and it looks as though some attempt was made at nailing pieces of broken wood from furniture to the window frames for a barrier. The front door is a wreck of broken wood littered with small and large holes. Bullet holes, probably. Inside the house all is quiet. No bodies. Things went down badly here.

  As usual, Grant doesn’t say anything. When we first arrived he searched the house, looking for all possible threats, and then sat us down in the kitchen, where we sit now. He’s going through the cupboards, all of which are mostly empty. His search is diligent, and he finds a can beans.

  “Do you think anyone survived?” I ask.

  “What, here?”

  “Yeah.”

  Grant shrugs. “Does it matter? It’s a place for us to stay for the night.”

  “There’s a fireplace,” I say. “You think we could maybe have a hot can of beans instead of frozen?” Though what I really want is the warmth. Grant sees through this, though.

  He shakes his head. “Nope. Sorry. We can’t risk attracting any of the undead. A fire would certainly do that. Now don’t go complaining to me of how cold you are. We all are, and now you have a big winter jacket to huddle in. So, no bitching.”

  I chew on my bottom lip, tasting blood from cracked lips. He’s right. I can’t complain, no matter how much I want to mouth off at him. The coat is big and black, with fur all along the inside and a hood. It fits like a tent, but it is warm as all hell. Or maybe it’s warmed up outside, I’m not sure. But I’m no longer shivering.

  Grant takes out a hunting knife and begins stabbing at the top of the can he had found. Soon, we are eating chunks of frozen beans that should be tasteless, but are rather tasty. My mouth waters while eating, and I know that the flavor comes more from the starvation than the beans actually tasting good.

  I don’t even have to fight Cindy to eat. She jams the chunks into her mouth and barely chews before it’s down her throat. I savor my portion, glad that Grant isn’t killing and chopping us up as I had feared. He could have had a Charlie and Cindy stew tonight, but he didn’t. Of course, he might be looking for a better place. Something more secure than this old battle ground. But for now I’m confident he doesn’t want to eat us.

  Perhaps it’s the tiredness. Although my parents were drunken drug addicts, I never went without food until all this undead business began. Hunger is a curious creature. A painful one. I feel hollow inside, as though there’s nothing to my bones; no marrow, just hollowed out tubes holding a frail frame and forcing it forward. My stomach always hurts from hunger. Now everything else hurts too.

  I remember talking to people back in high school who didn’t eat much. Tracy was an anorexic young woman who was an acquaintance of mine. We sometimes shared the same classes and whenever we did, we sat together. I don’t know why this was. We weren’t friends outside of class, our relationship only really meriting a nod of recognition, a short and silent, “Hey, how’s it going?” whenever we pass each other in the hallways.

  She was so skinny. She always claimed to be cold and almost always wore sweaters, even in the warmer days of spring and autumn. When she wasn’t wearing that, I could see her ribcage through her t-shirts. Her arms were as thin as pencils, her face a skin mask pulled tightly over her skull with sunken eyes and protruding teeth. Her bleached blond hair was usually the only thing about her that looked healthy.

  Everyone knew that she didn’t eat. Or, if she did eat, it was only an apple a day or something. Nobody said anything. That was the teacher’s and guidance councilor’s jobs, and judging by how she never put on any weight, they failed often.

  Nobody said anything but me, that first day in grade nine when we sat together for the first time. It was a coincidence that we sat together, but until that day I had never seen a walking skeleton before. One reason why I didn’t have many friends back then is because I’m not a great charmer. The first thought that enters my head is often the one that come stumbling out of my mouth whenever I’m nervous.

  I was nervous sitting beside Tracy McCann. Despite her pencil thin arms and legs, her skull-like face, something of which does not attract me, she held an air about her that suggested importance. She always had. There I was, looking at her, feeling those butterflies flickering their sharp wings into my stomach, and I couldn’t help but be blunt.

  “I’ve never seen somebody so skinny!” I said when I sat down beside her. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you eat?”

  She looked at me
with those sunken blue eyes, and she smiled. It might have been appreciation for my honesty, or perhaps, as an anorexic, she was proud of her skinniness. She did look proud.

  “No,” she said. “Not much.”

  “You don’t look poor,” I said.

  “I’m not,” she said.

  “So what, you just don’t like to eat? Are you sick?”

  She laughed. “You’re full of questions, aren’t you?”

  I held my hand up. “It’s just that, you know, wow!”

  She laughed again, and I think she blushed. Looking back on it now, I think that perhaps she was proud of her skinniness. It was something she had worked hard on, no matter how much it was killing her.

  “I just don’t like to eat. It makes you fat,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said, confused. I ate whenever I could and as much as I could, and I wasn’t fat. “You have to eat something,” I continued. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here with us right now.”

  “Oh, I do eat. Just not much.”

  I asked her one day if it hurt. Not eating much. She told me that no, the hunger eventually goes away

  From that day on, if we shared class, we always sat together.

  Sitting in the abandoned kitchen of a scene where people had died through a means of the undead cannibalizing the living and the living starving to death, I have trouble believing her. My eyelids hang heavy and everything, especially my stomach, hurts.

  We were only in grade eleven when the apocalypse began, so I’ve no idea what happened to Tracy. I miss her in a way. While sitting in class we’d always talk about stupid, non-important things, like American Idol or Family Guy, and I miss that. She didn’t judge me for whatever it was everyone else judged me for. At least, not in class. I didn’t judge her too much for starving herself. Yet, I can’t help thinking it ironic if she had become one of those things. A walking dead, constantly looking for fresh meat to bite into and eat.